Neirud, the debut documentary feature by Brazilian director Fernanda Faya, premieres its official trailer and poster in anticipation of its international premiere at the 14th edition of DOC NYC, taking place November 8-26 in New York City.
Confronting family secrets, prejudices, and the failures of collective memory, filmmaker Faya pieces together the remarkable life story of her mysterious Aunt Neirud, an Afro-Brazilian circus wrestler throughout the 1960s-1980s known by her controversial ring persona, “Gorilla Woman” who died shrouded in mystery, leaving no trace of her famous past behind. Faya unearths a fascinating story of uncompromising identity and forbidden love in a taboo-breaking all-female wrestling troupe in this touching documentary portrait of a pioneering circus icon.
Female wrestling in Brazil is one of the most important and unknown facets of the local circus history—through interviews with former women wrestlers and their descendants, Faya pieced together a love story dedicated to her aunt. Rescued from the archives, she comes to life as one of the pioneers in the art of wrestling, who became a trailblazer to subsequent generations. Both a personal love story and a reckoning with national memory, Neirud highlights a life-long devotion to a non-conformist life and an urgent affirmation of her existence.
“Growing up, filmmaker Fernanda Roth Faya knew Neirud as her ‘aunt,’ a family member close to her grandmother. What Faya uncovers after Neirud’s death is a mysterious and colorful life, from her time as a wrestler and circus performer to her secret and complicated love triangle. Neirud is a fascinating story about race and identity, and queer life in last century’s Brazil” wrote programmer Murtada Elfadl for the DOC NYC website.
Neirud had its world premiere at the Olhar de Cinema Curitiba International Film Festival last June, where it won the Grand Prix for Best Film and Best Editing Awards. The film will screen in the International Competition section of DOC NYC with an in-person screening on Saturday, November 11 at Village East by Angelika, and it will be available to stream stateside between Sunday, November 12, and Sunday, November 26.
Faya is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and educator born and raised in Sao Paulo and based in Queens, New York. She is currently finishing the short doc Alone Together, an intimate glimpse into the lives of elderly immigrants living in a low-income home, and developing her first fiction film, Bete, recipient of the Spcine Development Fund. Her first short film, One for the Road, explores the migration of her Jewish grandparents from Romania to Brazil diving into her own Jewish heritage as she relocated to New York City. It premiered at DOC NYC and screened in festivals worldwide. She holds an MFA in documentary storytelling from Hunter College Integrated Media Arts program and is a professor of Cinematography at Brooklyn College in New York. Faya is a Brazilian Collective of Female Cinematographers (DAFB) member.
Watch the official trailer:
